After a couple hours in Photoshop, the fences are gone, the electric wires overhead are gone, and the horses are a darker sillhouette against the sunset. Not bad for a first try! I can see why this Photoshop thing is so addictive!

Also, notice the watermark, made by my brilliant friends at HappyPupDesign. This is going to be the name of my photo studio. ‘Fetching Photos by Stephanie’. I’m working on setting up the website now.

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Our driveway has it’s fall colors on…

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We are going to be selling our ‘3 Happy Acres’ and moving to something smaller and closer to town. It’s just too expensive to live out in the country, spending so much money on gas to run into town all the time, and then having to take care of 3 acres between the two of us. We’re looking forward to a smaller house payment, and less to mow.

So I’m working on cleaning and de-cluttering the house. I started with the bathroom, because the walls were covered with my vintage ‘bathroom fish’ collection.

The bottom one is actually a glass tray with a neat printed fish scene on it. I love all this stuff, but I won’t have room for so much of it where we’re going, so I put them up on eBay.

I love looking at urban photography, but I’m not sure what I’m looking for yet so it’s hard to do myself. Whenever we go into town I like to sneak in a little photography if I can.

I should have taken a before picture, but once I get it in my head to get to work, I dive right in! Today we spent about three hours working in the yard. Dave used the string trimmer to knock down the weeds around the chicken run, I took the loppers and the sawzall and trimmed low hanging branches off the cherry tree and cut down all the volunteer saplings coming up in that area. We went and pulled up tansy that was coming up around the hidden areas of the yard. Then Dave went and sprayed round-up on the blackberry bushes. This is supposed to be the perfect time of year to spray them, and they will take it into the ground and kill the stuff underground – we’ll see, I’m a bit skeptical about it! The blackberries are so hard to kill, and they come up all over the place, I sure would like to see them gone. I’m trying so hard to catch up all around the yard, and this year I feel like I’m winning!

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Our camera club assignment for this month is to try and build a better understanding of focal length, and using aperture to get the results we want in our photos. A better understanding of this would have helped my portrait photos last week!

Using my 28-80mm lens, I went out to take some pictures of a beautiful rose I spotted on the bush out in the dog run.

Still 60mm, exp: 1/400, upped f-stop to f25, more detail on rear pedals, and leaves behind are in focus. Because the f-stop is a larger number, the aperture (the opening in the lens) is smaller, so the picture is a little darker – less light was let in, even though the camera compensated by upping the exposure. But it can be brightened up in editing.

I spent a bit of time outside this morning learning more about how my camera works, trying to do closeups of flowers and bees. Playing with the f-stops and exposures. – I have much to learn! My DSLR has so many buttons and modes and settings, it’s a challenge!

I think this was my best attempt at getting the bee in focus and letting the rest of the picture be soft.